


(un)lucky boy

by shmabs



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Backstory, Boarding School, Character Study, Dirk is Psychic, Electrocution, Gen, Mild torture, Original Character(s), Svlad Cjelli - Freeform, The CIA Fucking Sucks, basically just a brief look at svlad/dirk from childhood to the beginning of the show, even when the story is not actually abt lesbians, very good at including lesbians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 02:05:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12244962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shmabs/pseuds/shmabs
Summary: When Svlad was a boy, no more than six or seven, he correctly predicted the death of his great uncle a full week before the man passed from this world to whatever lay beyond. His family was, perhaps unsurprisingly, alarmed and uncomfortable and afraid. His mother was a woman that had little patience for nonsense - nonsense being, of course, anything that she could not understand right away and therefore consisted of Svlad’s entire existence - and so he was taken to a hospital where his premonition (“A hunch mum, that’s all it was”) was transcribed into print and then filed away with all the other records of young boys and girls who do or say strange things that frighten their parents.With quite a lot of hospital mismanagement and a little bit of luck, most of those files lay dormant, never to be opened again. But Svlad had never been a lucky boy.





	(un)lucky boy

**Author's Note:**

> there's a brief scene that involves what i would call mild torture i guess?? if you're worried about the content i've explained it in the note at the end of the fic
> 
> enjoy this totally self-indulgent (and totally made up) exploration of dirk's past~~~

When Svlad was a boy, no more than six or seven, he correctly predicted the death of his great uncle a full week before the man passed from this world to whatever lay beyond. His family was, perhaps unsurprisingly, alarmed and uncomfortable and afraid. His mother was a woman that had little patience for nonsense - nonsense being, of course, anything that she could not understand right away and therefore consisted of Svlad’s entire existence - and so he was taken to a hospital where his premonition (“A _hunch_ mum, that’s all it was”) was transcribed into print and then filed away with all the other records of young boys and girls who do or say strange things that frighten their parents.

With quite a lot of hospital mismanagement and a little bit of luck, most of those files lay dormant, never to be opened again. But Svlad had never been a lucky boy.

A man came to his family’s flat the week after he turned eleven, wearing an ugly grey suit and ugly black shoes and a wide, benign smile that made the hair on the back of Svlad’s neck stand up.

His mother waved the man inside, her ever present cigarette trailing smoke that floated gently up towards the ceiling and then dissipated, leaving only the acrid smell behind. Svlad hated cigarettes.

“Your son is very gifted,” the man said. He was sitting at one of the rickety chairs in the dining room, suit jacket buttoned and hands resting palm up on his knees. He was still smiling.

“My son is very good at getting himself into situations,” she said, and ashed the cigarette into a cup of water on the table. “He’s not very good at getting himself out of them.”

“Well we’d be more than happy to help with that, Ma’am.”

The morning that the man came, Svlad had gotten a stomach ache so bad that he couldn’t leave his bed, could only curl up and clutch at his belly and pray that it went away. In a few hours his prayer was answered, but he was left with a feeling of immense dread, as if he had just lost something very important but hadn’t figured out what it was yet.

He found out the next morning that he was being sent to a new boarding school in London. His mother gave him one battered suitcase to fill with his things and a new pair of trainers and put him on the 10 o’clock train with a brusque kiss to his forehead. He would never see his mother again, but he already knew that.

 

***

 

The boarding school he was sent to wasn’t really _in_ London, he discovered shortly after he was picked up from the train station, but rather on the outskirts, in a forgotten corner of the city.

There were two large dormitories located on opposite ends of a large, unkempt field, made of crumbling brick and mortar. The dorms were separated by gender, with girls in the dorm that had a green door and boys in the dorm with a red door. There were three buildings for classes: one for the sciences, one for humanities, and one for physical fitness. All of them, including the dorms, were old and drafty and disconcerting, the staff was harsh and unforgiving and the students were weird at best, downright unsettling at worst. Svlad loved it.

He had always been a bit of a loner, no good at making friends and even worse at keeping them, and his hunches kept him from behaving like a normal child. But his classmates were, if not exactly like him, similar enough in their own ways to overlook each other's oddities and form real, genuine friendships.

Svlad, for the first time in his life, had a best friend. Her name was Genevieve - she was a few months older than him with curly black hair and wide brown eyes and she talked very very fast, just like him, and was also afraid of frogs and he didn’t think he had ever loved anyone so much in his life, not even his mum.

“Do you think we’re special?” she asked him one day when the chill of fall had just begun to set in. They were lying under one of the trees near the dormitory with the green door, arms and legs flung out in different directions.

“Nah.”

“Really?” She sat up and looked down at him, frowning. He hated when she frowned at him.

“I think we are. You’ve got your hunches and Reggie has his thing with water and, y’know, I’ve got my thing and we’re not normal. We weren’t normal at our old schools like all those other kids so that means we’re different from them. We’re special.”

“Different doesn’t always mean special,” Svlad said, because he could still hear the echoes of his mother’s voice, not loud and screaming but quiet and so so disappointed in him whenever his differences made themselves known. “And what’s your thing anyways? You’ve never told me.”

“If you’re gonna be all grumpy then never mind. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah but I told you about my hunches like two months ago! I promise I’ll believe you.”

Genevieve sighed and flopped back down on the ground next to him.

“I know you’ll believe me I just...don’t like talking about it.”

“Okay,” he said. There was a beat of quiet, the only sound between them the rustling of grass and the leaves from the tree up above, green starting to melt into shades of yellow and orange, and then -

“So like, it’s not all the time, only sometimes,” Genevieve said. Her voice was softer, quieter than usual, so Svlad scooted across the ground closer to her. “And it depends on if I’m paying attention or if I’m distracted. But if I’m really concentrating and feeling okay then I can see if someone’s like good or bad or really really evil bad I guess. Which is why I don’t like Dr. Blaine at all and why I liked you so much right away - I just looked at you and knew that you were good and that we would be best friends.” The sun was about to set and the temperature had already begun dropping but Svlad, even in his threadbare jumper and socks with holes in the toes and heels, felt warm all the way through. Genevieve thought that he was good, had looked at him and something within her had said YES THIS ONE’S ALRIGHT and, even more overwhelming than that, she had said that they were _best friends_.

It was one of the happiest days of his life.

Svlad had learned early on that good things didn’t tend to last, and this one was no exception. They had four good years before everything went to shit. Four years of idle conversation and hastily finished class projects, of hiding frogs in each others pillowcases and, more than once, having a small funeral for the frogs they accidentally killed. They were four good years.

When the end came, it was Svlad’s fault. He had felt a growing sense of unease for a few weeks, a slow and inexorable march forward into something bad, but he never was very good at figuring out the specifics. And he had never been able to shake that feeling until the bad thing happened, had never managed to avoid it entirely, to do something so crazy and unexpected that the flow of the universe would be forced to ripple and bend around him. But he was hopeful.

Genevieve had just turned fifteen when they started noticing that some of their classmates were leaving without saying goodbye. It wasn’t that unusual for someone to be taken back by their parents, but it was only ever the kids that were normal - the ones that ended up being weird in the traditional sense, that weren’t _special_. But they would always at least say their goodbyes, give out hugs to their close friends and maybe leave behind a book they were lending to someone. But then Reggie disappeared after class one Tuesday and never returned. After that it was Kinesha and Trevor, the twins.

It wasn’t every week, or even every month, but it was often enough that Svlad and Genevieve couldn’t help but notice. They talked about it sometimes, huddled together on one of the couches in the common area or lying in the grass under their tree. They figured it had something to do with being special - that maybe being _too_ special meant you were taken somewhere else.

Svlad was in his monthly session with the on-campus counselor when it happened. He was tired, hadn’t slept very well for the past few days and was consumed with an inexplicable sense of dread.

“Svlad. Svlad? _Svlad_.” He started, tearing his gaze away from the drops of rain slowly slipping down the window and back to the counselor’s face. She didn’t look particularly old or young, could have been anywhere between 28 and 48 years old, but she had that same benign, awful smile that made Svlad’s teeth hurt.

“Yes miss, I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked you what you had against Dr. Blaine. In some of our previous sessions,” she flipped through a few pages of the yellow notebook pad sitting in her lap, “you’ve expressed that you feel uncomfortable around him. Could you explain, please?”

“Well, Genevieve doesn’t like him so I don’t like him. He gives her the creeps.”

“And why does he ‘give her the creeps,’ so to speak?”

His gaze drifted back to the window and his eyes drooped closed a bit. He was so tired.

“She just looked at him and knew he was bad. That’s kind of her thing. She can look at you and see if you’re good or bad or really bad. So that’s why.”

“Ah, well. That’s very interesting Svlad, thank you,” she said, and started noisily scribbling down notes.

There was a moment of quiet as Svlad watched a drop of water teeter at the top of the window and begin making its way down and then he blinked and felt that horrible feeling roiling in his stomach wash through the rest of his body and all the air in the room went stale in his mouth and he realized that this was what his hunch had been trying to tell him, that this decent and good time in his life was about to come to an end and that he himself would be the cause of its downfall.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” he said quickly, too quickly. He sounded desperate, he could tell.

“Oh it’s quite alright Svlad, you know these little conversations are confidential.” She looked up from her notepad and smiled at him, wide and triumphant and terrifying and Svlad had to get out of there as fast as possible so he got up without another word and slammed open the door. Genevieve was waiting for him outside under their tree, he knew, so he ran there on shaky legs, breathing hard and with tears making his vision blurry.

When he got close enough he could see that this hunch, as with most of his hunches, was right - she was sitting under the tree, back up against the trunk. She smiled when she saw him approaching but it faded quickly when she saw his ashen face.

“Svlad, holy shit are you okay? What happened?”

“I think,” he started, and the tears blurring his vision began to spill down his face, as unstoppable as the universe itself. “I think I might have buggered everything up.”

“No, no I’m sure you didn’t. Just tell me what’s wrong and we can fix it, yeah?”

“I told them. I didn’t mean to, but I told them. About you. How you’re special.”

“What?” She said it like a question, like he could just give her a different answer and everything would be fine. But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t lie to her.

“I’m sorry Genevieve, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to.” He was sobbing now, big heavy tears rolling down his face as the last of the seemingly omnipresent rain clouds cleared up and the weak light of the sun began to break through.

“It’s okay. Svlad calm down, it’s gonna be okay.” She grabbed him by the shoulders and tucked his head under her chin, patting his back awkwardly and holding him until he had calmed enough to speak.

“I’m still sorry,” he mumbled, wiping the tears and snot away from his face. “I know you hate to talk about it and you trusted me and now I told my stupid counselor and they’re probably gonna ask you about it and take you away. Ugh, why isn’t my special thing keeping my mouth shut?”

“Well, then you wouldn’t be Svlad,” she shrugged. “Let’s get some dinner okay? Then I can beat your ass at checkers for the zillionth time and we can just forget about it. And if anything changes we’ll deal with it then.”

“Alright,” he said. But that feeling of dread was still there all throughout dinner and checkers - even the game that Genevieve obviously let him win - and as they parted ways for curfew, her through the green door and him through the red, he couldn’t help but think that this might be the last time he saw her.

The next morning she wasn’t at breakfast or their first class together or their second and by that point he knew that she wouldn’t be at lunch either but he looked anyway, checked under their tree and in the common area and all around the little pond overrun by frogs. When he went to the administrative office and asked the secretary there all she said was that Genevieve had been transferred to another school. Asking what the school’s name was got him a condescending laugh and asking for her mailing address got him a dismissive glance. After that he was ignored entirely.

A week later he was sprawled under their tree when he made a decision. He would see Genevieve again. Even if the universe was kind of an asshole sometimes, he didn’t think it could be this cruel. And even if it was, he would do his best to game the system.

So at his next counseling session he went right in, sat down in the uncomfortably squishy chair in front of the counselor's desk, and said, “I know things sometimes, things I couldn’t possibly know under normal circumstances, because I am, at least slightly, sometimes even more than slightly, psychic.”

The counselor blinked at him once, twice and then slowly reached for her notepad.

“Alright Svlad. If that’s true, tell me what I’m writing right now.”

He concentrated, focused on the slippery pull that he had come to realize was his tenuous connection to the whims of the universe, and let his mind go totally blank. It took him a minute, thinking about nothing in particular and staring at the window, before he took a deep breath and recited, not from memory but some other transient pocket of the universe he had managed to dip his head into, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

The counselor was quiet for a moment and then that same smug, victorious smile came over her face. “Very good Mr. Cjelli, I’m impressed. You’ll be hearing some good news very soon.”

He nodded and said nothing and left. It only took him twenty minutes to pack up all his belongings and he laid down for bed that night fully clothed, shoes still on. There was a chance that they wouldn’t take him to the same place they took Genevieve but he figured with a little luck he would be seeing her as early as the next day.

But Svlad had never been a lucky boy.

The facility he was taken to was in America, which he knew only because he was put on a private plane by a large man with an accent so obnoxiously American it grated on Svlad’s ears. When he got there words like “psychic” and “premonitions” and “extrasensory” were thrown around by unsmiling people in bulky suits as he was measured and weighed and checked over by so many different doctors that he lost count.

Eventually he was taken to a small grey room by one of the unsmiling men wearing a particularly ill-fitting suit. As the man opened the door Svlad realized with a start that it was so ill-fitting because of the large guns he had tucked into holsters under each arm. He quickly looked away and into the room itself, noting that there was a cot in one corner and a walled off portion that Svlad assumed was the loo in another. There was also a kitchen area with a small refrigerator, sink, and a microwave sitting on the counter.

“This is your new room, kid,” the man said and nudged him inside. “Welcome to the CIA.”

 

***

 

The day after Svlad turned 18, he decided that he was going to change his name. The day after the day after Dirk turned 18, his CIA handlers decided that he wasn’t responding quickly enough to positive reinforcement and began training with the incentive to avoid punishment.

It did not go well, for Dirk or for his handlers.

His ability - his power or special thing or whatever people wanted to call it - didn’t work in a way that he could easily explain. His hunches were fleeting sometimes, there one moment and then gone the next, too quick to understand what the universe wanted of him. Other times they were there for days or weeks, buzzing in the back of his head, reminding him over and over that there were things he was meant to be doing, that there would always be things to do, mysteries to solve, things to discover about the universe that he couldn’t even fathom yet.

It was not, by any means, something that he had even a modicum of control over.

So his handlers would strap him to chair in a plain white room with a table full of things - toys, tools, children’s drawings, official looking documents - and he was meant to tell the people standing behind the large pane of one-way glass something about the owner of each item.

He picked up a post-it note covered in incomprehensible cursive and said, “This one’s a doctor, right? Because this handwriting is atroci-”

A bolt of electricity crackled through his body. His jaw snapped shut at the pain and he tasted blood in his mouth - he had bit halfway through his tongue. Dirk had never been tasered before but he figured it probably felt a lot like that.

It took him a moment to gather himself enough for speech but when he did -

“What in the bloody fucking hell do you think you’re doing? This is torture!”

Silence.

And then, a speaker on the wall above the glass crackled to life.

“Language, Svlad - ”

“It’s Dirk, actually. I told you all yesterday I go by Dirk now.”

“Alright. Dirk, then. Watch your language, you know this is official government business. There’s no room for that kind of profanity. And this is for your own good. We’ve noticed a pattern of lazy behavior recently and we want to make sure that you’re really trying here. This is just a way to ensure you don’t goof off and waste your time and ours. That’s all it is,” the voice said. Dirk didn’t know this voice, had never encountered them before in any of the examinations he was subjected to or tests he was made to take. But he knew at least one person standing behind the glass.

“So if I don’t listen to you then you’ll, what, shock me until I’m an obedient little lab rat? You see how ridiculous that is, right? Colonel Riggins, you’ve got to see how crazy this is.”

Silence.

“Well _fuck_ that,” Dirk snarled. “And fuck all of you too.”

Another shock, like lightning coursing through his veins. He squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the edge of the table until his fingers hurt. When the electricity finally left his body he remained where he was, eyes closed and breathing hard and seething with anger. He would break eventually, he knew that he would, but for now he was too stubborn to give in.

 

***

 

Dirk was with the CIA - or rather, he was forcibly held by the CIA to be their unwilling guinea pig so that they could hone his manifested psychic ability for their own gain - for 16 years. The minute he got out, something he had honestly never expected to happen, he went to a public library and scoured the internet for information on Genevieve Werther. But the internet was a confusing place and Dirk was not very good at googling (apparently “WHERE IS MY FRIEND GENEVIEVE WERTHER IS SHE OKAY” did not retrieve many search results).

On his third consecutive day back at the library and after searching through oodles of different websites, most of which Dirk did not understand the purpose of in the slightest, he found a picture posted on some kind of repository for faces. The last time he saw Genevieve she had been fifteen, limbs gangly and awkward and already half a foot taller than him. In this picture, Genevieve looked to be in her late twenties, maybe older, and she looked comfortable and sure of herself in a tailored black and white suit. She was smiling and embracing another woman wearing an elegant white dress. The caption under the photo read “CONGRATULATIONS to my sister Theresa and her new WIFE the former Ms. Genevieve Werther, now the illustrious Mrs. Genevieve Parker!!!!!”

Dirk smiled fondly at the clunky old library computer and quickly brushed away the wetness at the corners of his eyes before anyone else could notice.

It cost him a whole dollar to print out the picture, and then he realized that he didn’t have anything to put it in so he had to buy a wallet as well. He thought, for longer than he’d like to admit, about seeking out her address so that he could make sure she was really okay. But what would he even say? No, the important thing was that Genevieve was safe and happy and probably wouldn’t want him to show up in her life after he was the one that had fucked it up in the first place. So he set off on his own, letting the universe guide him freely for the first time in years.

It took him across the ocean to Rome and then Amsterdam and then a small unpronounceable town in Wales and then back to the U.S. to North Carolina and then Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona all at once and then, eventually, up to Seattle, which seemed like an okay place to be. And then, of course, he was hired (as a detective!) by a man who wanted Dirk to solve his eventual murder. It was too good to say no, so he didn’t.

There was an itch at the back of his neck leading up to his client’s murder, just the barest hint of a hunch that something big was coming and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He had realized at some point during his 16 years with the CIA that ignoring or repressing or going against his hunches would simply result in a splitting headache and a nosebleed, so he had resigned himself to being a leaf in the stream of creation, to following wherever the current of the universe took him.

The phone rang. Dirk picked it up.

The case had begun.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> this fic features a brief scene where dirk is tazed several times in order to force him to comply to demands made by his CIA handlers. it's not super graphic but it is there so proceed with caution


End file.
